Didactics of Digital Educational Media
The current digital shift means that lessons are increasingly shaped and influenced by digital media and the phenomena of digitality (such as algorithms). The Didactics of Digital Educational Media department (DdB) explores the potential and the challenges of educational media in social science subjects (such as history, geography, politics, philosophy and religion) with a particular focus on how they are taught and how students learn them in our digital world. Such examinations require interdisciplinary approaches in order to fully capture the realities of teaching in schools and to develop opportunities for collaborative reflection and action (e.g. cross-sectional themes such as digitisation and democracy education). For this reason the DdB department will investigate the diverse possibilities, both subject-specific and interdisciplinary, in which digitality can influence teaching practice and the impact digital educational media can have within the complex learning-teaching environment. The department will descriptively record and reflect on how the different subjects are taught and learnt through the use of digital educational media within a ‘culture of digitality’, exploring the associated complexities, context specificity and ambivalence in order to draw conclusions that can be applied to, and shape, teaching practice.
-
Research
Research
The research conducted by the DdB Department is subject-specific and didactic (i.e. based on the concepts, principles and research fields specific to the education of the individual social sciences) and oriented towards the cultural studies fields (i.e. shaped by approaches, methods and categories used in cultural studies disciplines). Teaching in the social science subjects is viewed in terms of its structural features (i.e. teachers, students, teaching content, educational objectives, learning processes and social framework conditions) in order to explore issues at the intersection between subject-specific pedagogy and cultural studies. The department’s work therefore focusses on three key areas: The area of ‘reflection’ addresses theoretical, systematic and critical work on teaching and learning in a period of digital shift. The area of ‘investigation’ will primarily conduct qualitative studies into the production, content, appropriation, practices and reflection on and of education media that are based in the cultural and social sciences. The area of ‘design’ aims to develop pragmatic recommendations and concepts for subject-specific and interdisciplinary educational settings that use digital educational media.
The department will also explore the increasing challenges that digitalisation is presenting to democratic societies (through an increase in undemocratic content on the internet, influence of AI-output on public opinion etc.) and the calls from education policy-makers to more firmly embed democracy education as an interdisciplinary principle. The department’s Junior Research Group (JRG) researches the area of digital educational media and democracy education in more depth.
The DdB Department makes an innovative contribution to subject-specific and educational media research and aims to stimulate critical, reflective, creative and productive guidance for teachers and students working with digital media. Beyond the subject-specific perspectives, the department aims to foster a deeper interdisciplinary understanding of digital educational media in order to enable considered decisions to be made regarding its role in lessons, schools and democratic societies.
-
Research Infrastructure
Research Infrastructure
The research lab, ‘The Basement’ plays a central role in the work of the DdB department. The GEI’s digital lab provides media equipment, technical research facilities and an open design that all allow teaching and learning scenarios with digital educational media to be tested and researched from a subject-specific and cultural studies perspective. It not only provides a space for the development and execution of research projects within the department, it also strives to be an integral part of a research network that enables regular communication on themes central to the department and where project ideas can be generated and developed. The department is thus instrumental in fostering understanding and facilitating dialogue between didactics researchers in the social sciences with regard to the effective use of digital educational media
